"Stuff is eaten by dogs, broken by family and friends, sanded down by the wind, frozen by the mountains, lost by the prairie, burnt off by the sun, washed away by the rain. So you are left with dogs, family, friends, sun, rain, wind, prairie and mountains. What more do you want?"
Federico Calboli

Sunday, September 29, 2013

New Lizards

"Throughout the history of lizard evolution, several lizard lineages have lost their legs, James Parham of Cal State Fullerton
said. Snakes are the best-known and most diverse of these lineages, but
more than 200 other types of limbless lizards exist throughout the
world.

"In California, five legless lizard species have been identified, all of them part of a group called Anniella.
Four of these legless lizards are new to science and were recently
described in Breviora, a publication of the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard University."

These animals are so secretive that descriptions of their habitat can sound ridiculous.

"One of the four newly identified species of Anniella, the Southern California legless lizard, was found under some dead leaves in dunes at the west end of LAX.

"The Bakersfield legless lizard was found in three vacant lots in that city's downtown.

"The southern Sierra legless lizard was spotted in three dry canyons
on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and the Temblor legless lizard was
found in the oil fields around Taft, a city on the southwestern edge of
the San Joaquin Valley."

2 comments:

To be fair, the dunes at the west end of LAX are not open to the public. They're fenced off, ostensibly to protect the rare El Segundo Blue Butterfly. I like to think it's a secret rocket launch site, as well as a hotbed of wildlife activity.